Barbara Hannah – The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women – Quotations
The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Volume 1
The Animus: Spirit of the Inner Truth in Women, Volume 2
Barbara Hannah – Spirit of Inner Truth in Women
Jung pointed out that as soon as a woman begins controlling her animus or a man his anima they come up against the herd instinct in mankind. ~Barbara Hannah, Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 14
Emma Jung said in a seminar that there are times when one should use emotion. Jung added that this was true, but one should never be its slave. One should only use emotion when one is not identical with it, when one can just as well do without it. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus, The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 226-227
… Jung once poínted out that the animus, in and of itself, is neither good nor evil, but is a completely dual figure. He only becomes infernal when he hooks onto egotistical demands in the human being. ~Barbara Hannah, Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 35
Marie-Louise von Franz is our expert on fairy tales at the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich. I would like to express my gratitude to her here, for she has taught me practically all that I know concerning this issue. ~Barbara Hannah, Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Fn 56
The animus also very often appears as a plurality. Jung mentioned Christina Alberta’s Father by H. G. Wells more than once in his seminars as an excellent example of the way that the animus works in women. ~Barbara Hannah, Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 17
One of the techniques that Jung recommends for getting acquainted with our animus is to keep a sharp lookout on our speech, in particular our thoughts, and to constantly question them as they pass through our minds: ~Barbara Hannah, Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 17
The visual form in which the woman watches her animus objectively and learns to take a hand in the game herself is at least equally, effective. Some women prefer to do things silently with their animus, just feeling his presence, and so on. The important thing is to find the way which suits the individual. ~Aniela Jaffe, Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 22
The thing we must never forget in dealing with the animus is that he is dual, he always has a negative and positive aspect (a fact that, of course, also applies to the anima). ~Barbara Hannah, Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 15
Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women
By the term Animus, I understand the masculine, spirit or unconscious mind of woman. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 2
Now when a woman writes of the animus, she is always up against the fact that the animus himself may have his own views on the matter. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 4
Jung once pointed out in a seminar that, whereas portraits of the anima are exceedingly common in literature, good portraits of the animus are very rare. He thought this might be because the animus to a great extent writes the books of women himself and prefers not to give himself away. (The anima, on the contrary, seems to be rather fond of sitting for her portrait!) Thus when I write, I never feel quite sure how much the animus, like a wily old fox, is obliterating his tracks with his brush! ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 4-5
In fact, you can never arrive at the animus unless you see the shadow, unless you see your own inferior sides. When you see your shadow, you can detach from the animus, but as long as you don’t see it, you have not a ghost of a chance. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 9-10
On the one hand, these figures have a personal aspect so that we can talk of my animus or your anima and, on the other, they are inhabitants of the collective unconscious so that it sometimes seems far more correct to speak of the animus and the anima. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 13
Therefore it seems to me of vital importance to never forget that the animus— however personally we may take him— is also a figure of the collective unconscious. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 14
The thing we must never forget in dealing with the animus is that he is dual, he always has a negative and positive aspect (a fact that, of course, also applies to the anima). ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 15
Perhaps the most usual and least unpleasant way of learning to know our animus is through our dreams. In dreams he usually appears personified, and it is there that we first lean to regard him as a person. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 17
The place where the animus usually makes us most unhappy is when he interferes in our relationships. As mentioned before, ‘ the leading principle of women and the anima is Eros, and that of men and the animus is Logos. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 18
It is also in our vital relationships to men that we usually first discover the animus in projection. As long as. the projection fits, we are generally totally unaware that it exists. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 18
The animus, therefore, can have an exceedingly severing effect. If the relationship— to the husband, analyst, or someone else— is important enough to us, we shall suffer a great deal in this respect. But this also forms an invaluable incentive to investigate and discover the animus. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 18
These conversations with the anima or animus are a form of so-called active imagination, a technique which is unsurpassed in providing a middle territory where conscious and unconscious can unite. ~ Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 20
(It is true that a modem woman who faces her unconscious because her life is disturbed by knowing too little of her own mind or animus, is in a very different position from the Brontes.) ~Barbara Hannah – The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 21
One day, when a woman who did a good deal of active imagination was talking to her animus, she heard him suddenly remark:
“You and I are in a most awfully difficult position. We are linked together like Siamese twins and yet belong to totally different realities. You know, your reality is just as invisible and ghostlike to me as mine is to you.” ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 22
The animus opinions have turned us into a beast of prey. But if we admit and know that we let the animus catch us (in this case, facing the fact that we have lost the hour and made a nuisance of ourselves, if not worse), we suffer the penalty and thus, by our suffering, give the blood that can transform the animus. ~ Barbara Hannah. The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 24
The animus, which appeared in the first dream as a bird-headed monster with a bubblelike body, begins to lose its dangerous and destructive character in a dream where he is living on the moon as the ghostly lover of a human girl. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 23
The animus. it is true, will always turn the tables very neatly and if he fails in his endeavor to make a woman blame the analyst, husband, partner, or whoever it be, then he will attempt to throw the whole balance on the woman herself. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 24
Doubt is the crown of life and all certainty is merely one-sided. For in uncertainty and doubt, truth and error come together. Doubt is life, truth is often stagnation and death. When you are in doubt you have the greatest opportunity to unite the dark and the light sides of life. ~ Carl Jung, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 25
Extreme certainty in the animus is always a sign that only one side of him is constellated, for his real dual nature forms a most painful paradox. Enduring this paradox is one of the chief ways we can give the “blood” needed to transform the animus. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 25
In order to get a real idea of the practical side of the animus, we must see him at work in a human life. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 26
The appearance of Mary Magdalene “herself,” who tells Jeanne that she is finally liberated, agrees with our own experience, according to which it is only with the help of the Self that we can be freed from the animus in his possessive aspect. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 39
Jung has often pointed out that the animus thinks in terms of 11,000 virgins, that is, statistics and numbers. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 30
The shadow not only maims the animus but destroys the woman s instinct as well. And all the princess can rescue is the head. (Talking to a head is a well-known archetypal motif: Wotan and Mimirs head, for instance.) ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 52
Of equally great importance In every woman’s life is relationship, for here she experiences the conditio sine qua non for freeing herself from the tyranny of being possessed by the animus, a possession which often happens entirely unknown to the woman herself, for the opinions he insinuates destroy the flow of all spontaneous life. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 62
This animus interference on. the outside has several aspects. First he interferes between us and the outside world and particularly in our relationships. With irrelevant opinions he cuts us off from our environment, from reality and from everything which is near, dear, and important to us. His is not the outside realm, but the inner. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 65
The sapientia, wisdom, will then tell us the important things and save us from the superfluities of our animus opinions and will save a man from the promiscuous arrows of Cupid:.. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 70
One might even say that the main purpose of working on the animus is to lead our interest back to, the moon, that is back to a woman’s own principle so that she may be the counterpart of man (and man the real counterpart of woman). and not a weak imitation. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 95-96
Unlike the anima, it is very difficult to find good material in which to see the animus at work. When I lectured on “The Animus in Literature” in 1957, I read a great many books by women with this point in view. I must break it to you that the harvest in literature has, on the face of it, been exceedingly disappointing. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 106
I asked myself therefore where the animus was in such a woman as Jane Austen? Although he does not portray himself, he cannot help from bowing into the game somewhere. The Evil Vineyard by Marie Hay which Jung introduced to me and said that it was the best example of a woman’s plot he had ever met. This book shows the spiritus rector particularly clearly. And then, if we have time, I should like to consider the books of Mary Webb particularly Precious Bane, which is the best animus story I know with the exception of Wuthering Heights. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 107-108
A man writes with his conscious mind; he can hold the line of his plot and his anima creates the atmosphere or the feeling tone of the book. Whereas a woman usually is quite at home in the feeling tone and can hold it consciously herself, but the life of the book, the plot, is in the hands of her spiritus rector. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 108
The animus, as spiritus rector, creates the structure of women’s plots, whereas the anima leaves this to man’s conscious mind and provides the atmosphere and feeling tone of his book. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 109
When a bad animus case produces a marvelous opinion one must say “Is it really yourself? Do you really stand behind this thought?
Are you convinces that things are really like that? Then a woman will often realize that she actually does not really think that herself and one has to ask whose opinion it is. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 113
…since animus and anima were originally deities, everything belonging to them is exceedingly important. One should always go into the secret history of such cases in order to find out the value of apparently quite unimportant little things, for they have some secret value and powerful magic effects. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 115
A woman’s vessel cannot be made by the mind but must be formed by Eros, by relatedness. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 121
As you know, the animus is in his right place only when he is functioning in that unknown invisible existence where he belongs. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 129
The tendency to distort reality on the part of both animus and anima is perhaps the most common reason why people have such difficulty with active imagination. They have not yet succeeded in imprisoning their animus, he is still all over the place, and he succeeds in distorting any direct experience of the inner world until it seems too silly to be taken seriously at all. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 132
Maria Prophetissa’s marriage of gum to gum is meant to sublimate the elusive, fugitive Mercurius, near cousin of the animus Hermes, the two being practically synonymous. Hermes, remember, is set at the highest stage in Jung’s four levels of development. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 136
As far as my experience goes, a desire only becomes an object of the animus if in one way or the other we are not taking the full responsibility for it and are indulging in fantasies about it. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 139
A vitally important point, and one we are apt to be very sentimental about, is the fact that it requires cruelty to glue down the animus. We have depended on him, spoiled and pampered him without realizing it, and thus it requires downright heroism to turn against him. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 142
But we can be sure that if we are controlling our anima or animus, we will get into a situation that is exceedingly difficult; we will be put to the test for sure. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 143
Controlling the animus or anima is like creating a vacuum. When you lift yourself out of a certain volume of space, it leaves a vacuum and then everything rushes in to fill the gap. People who make an attempt to take control over these figures meet other conditions that almost force them back to their former state. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 155
In real life, women generally deal with not the entire animus but with that part of the animus that is mostly an opinionating substitute for the depths of the spirit. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 146
The animus in the literary of women serves very much indeed as a form of the spirit, the spiritus rector, the ruling spirit of the work so to speak. The literary “spirit” of a woman’s novel has individually recognizable features. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 147
Before the Middle Ages, the animus is but scarcely documented. The animus of women had little chance to differentiate itself and develop, as it was so well contained by projection onto men—husbands, warriors, priests, statesmen, and the like. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 147
More direct examples of the animus can be seen in the personality and deeds of Judith in The Book of Judith or in Sarah and Asmodaeus in the Book of Tobit. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 148
The animus, in a demonic form, was known to possess women (as we witness with the sixteenth-century nun Jeanne Fery) or appeared in the form of the Grand Master among witches. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 148
I personally wasted many years trying with intellectual means to catch the animus at work in myself. This is somewhat like the dog chasing its own tail. One never catches the animus when he is constellated through writing, speech or thought, for these are tools of the spirit. It was first thought Eros that I got a glimpse of a feeling of a certain unreality, when the animus was aroused. Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 148
The animus does his best to swallow you and then despises you when he succeeds. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 148
I f the animus can take apart and take apart the object, it is a sign that we are actually only seeing our own faces in the object, and we are failing to perceive the object itself. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 149
Nothing but despair or great love will provide a woman with the necessary impetus to have it out with her animus. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 150
The more we can expel the animus from the personal world by strengthening our hold on the Eros principle, the more chance we have of developing our minds. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 150
What imprisons our animus is seeing reality by learning to experience what is true without the destructive veils of opinions in between. This tendency to distort is the reason why people such difficulty in. active imagination… ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 154
To imprison the anima or animus means a great sacrifice. It is an extraordinary accomplishment for a woman to say to her animus: “I will put you in a test tube for later examination.” ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 154
If the animus is free and all over the place, he can kill life with his opinions much like an arrow or spear can kill any living creature. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 155
The animus is the factor that forms projections. The same applies to a man but in the case of the anima it is a mood or a resentment. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 169
Animus means “mind” or “Spirit and corresponds to the paternal logos. The man’s anima performs the same function. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 169
This apparently extraordinary situation is due to the fact that when animus and anima meet, the animus seizes his sword of power and the anima sprays her poison. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 170
Nature is conservative and is not easy to disturb, and animus and anima defend their rights to the last ditch. Having a profound doubt as to the wisdom of forcing something upon nature with which it would have been better not to interfere, we then perhaps feel as if we should not bring things to consciousness. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 171
Jane Austen depicts a woman’s world of gossip but, in her early books, a world seen through the eyes of the animus. As I see it, she made an attempt to put her animus in the resin thus partially humanizing this woman’s world. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 199
A woman’s writing is, to some extent, a “having it out” with her animus, or in more ordinary language, her creative spirit. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 201
An animus-possessed woman cannot return to her instinct directly but must go through the spiritual side of the animus and reach the instinct again by that route. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 222
Moreover, the anima in her role of Maya, the world, is always trying to entangle a man in the outside world, whereas the animus tries to cut a woman out of her natural eras entanglements with her environment and to direct her attention to the inner world and to the animus himself. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 272
It is my considered opinion that the ego alone can do very little with the animus, for he is always too clever for it. ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 301
But the animus, in his original form, always tries to belittle the importance of the three-dimensional world, and here he reduces it to his favorite formula: “nothing but.” ~ Barbara Hannah, The Animus The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 308
By the term animus. l understand the masculine. spirit or unconscious mind of woman. Emma Jung pointed out recently that one should differentiate very carefully here between the anima and the animus. The anima, as is well known, is Jung’s term for the feminine soul of man. But it is really a contradiction in terms to speak of the animus as the masculine soul woman. (This error was made in the early days of Jungian psychology and is still often done today.) In Latin the word animus means intellect, memory, consciousness, character and spirit. It is often equated with “mind” and is also used to mean. courage, vivacity, bravery, and will. In Jungian psychology it is used primarily to denote the phenomenon of “spirit” in women, and the contrast between the feminine soul (anima) and the masculine spirit (animus) gives us a valuable hint as to the difference between these two figures. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus, The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 2
In conclusion for today, I would like to add a thought that Emma Jung shared with me. During the summer holidays, she read Emma Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen’s Emma and noted that their fathers were more than one could bear. I can think of no female English writer who was not a father’s daughter. Fanny Burney was also a fathers daughter, backed up by a cortège of other father figures such as Samuel Jackson and “Daddy (Samuel) Crisp.”
After they died, she married a French aristocrat a good deal older than herself. Maria Edgeworth gave her whole life to helping her father and wrote her first book in collaboration with him. Then there were the Brontes, George Eliot, and Mary Webb. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus, The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 178
Thus animus possession, negative as it is in itself, can in the end turn out to be a great gain. It is difficult to reach your mind without going through a period of animus possession. Learning to use it is well described in Emma Jungs excellent paper on the problem of the animus.
Nothing helps more than this type of possession, for the animus is primarily her unconscious mind. It may sound peculiar that Gideon gets her as a slave and at the same time gives her something that she wants so badly. But the animus is completely paradoxical. If one can stand the test and not go completely under— which Prue succeeds in doing— then one can gain a lot even from such an animus as Gideon. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus, The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 216-217
Emma Jung said in a seminar that there are times when one should use emotion. Jung added that this was true, but one should never be its slave. One should only use emotion when one is not identical with it, when one can just as well do without it. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus, The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Page 226-227
~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women Vol. II
The experience itself is the important thing, not its intellectual classification, which prove meaningful and helpful only when the road to original experience it blocked. -Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page ix
Since I have no wish to construct a world of speculative concepts which leads merely to the barren hair-splitting of philosophical discussions, I set no particular store by [reflections on these three terms] . If such concepts provisionally serve to put the empirical material in order, they will have fulfilled their purpose. -Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page 141
To me there is no liberation a taus prix. I cannot be liberated from anything that I . . . have not experienced. Real liberation becomes possible for me only when I have done all that I was able to do, when I have completely devoted myself to a thing and participated in it to the utmost. -Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page ix
However remote alchemy may seem to us today, we should not underestimate its cultural importance for the Middle Ages. Our own era is the child of the Middle Ages and it cannot disown its parents. -Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page 62
Never have we been more in need of the Christian virtues than in the dark days we live in, when evil seems to predominate as never before, and it is just as bad to forget the good we are capable of as to be unable to see our defects and the evil we are capable of. -Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page 7
If we equate cognitio with consciousness, then Augustine’s thought would suggest that the merely human and natural consciousness gradually darkens, as at nightfall. But just as evening gives birth to morning, so from the darkness arises a new light, the stella matutina, that is at once the evening and the morning star-Lucifer, the light-bringer. ~Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 302
For the knowledge of the creature, in comparison with the knowledge of the Creator, is but a twilight; and so it dawns and breaks into morning when the creature is drawn to the love and praise of the Creator. Nor is it ever darkened, save when the Creator is abandoned by the love of the creature. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 149
Jung was allergic to the negative animus/ So if you approached him when your animus was uppermost-even to say good morning-you were helped to realize this fact in a way you would not so quickly forget. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 1
Emma Jung used to emphasize how necessary it was to differentiate carefully between the anima and the animus. The anima, as you all know, is Jung’s term for the feminine soul of man, whereas the word animus means “spirit” or “mind.” ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 3
That is why creative work is so invaluable to a woman: she cannot work creatively without a direct relation to her own mind, and this particular part of her mind is, in the beginning, oftentimes unconscious. This is also why so many women prefer to let their husbands do creative work for them or, as Emma Jung emphasized, prefer to have another child. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 4
It would be blasphemy to assert that God can manifest Himself everywhere save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship between God and the soul automatically precludes any devaluation of the latter. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 11
As Jung makes so clear in his essay ‘Woman in Europe,” it is Eros, her relationship to the man, that is really all-important for woman; less essential is the sexual side, so all important to man. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women Volume II Page 5
The animus, in his original untransformed shape, is just like a jealous lover himself, and he will continually try to possess the woman for himself. This “jealous lover who destroys relationships with men” will also be seen in the wildly possessive nature of the spirits reported by the medieval nun Jeanne Fery. The animus also loves to project himself onto the wrong man, and then when the woman is bitterly disappointed, he whispers: “Poor dear, but you know all men are the same, you will only be happy quite alone with me. ” ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 5-6
Jung used to say that the animus wanted to settle everything for the 11,000 virgins for the next 10,000 years. The absolutism of the political state completely disregards the claim of the individual; it even regards it as worthless compared to the mass of the people. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 14
For behind the animus is the far more powerful figure of the Self that alone can easily set the animus in his right place. I wasted a lot of time arguing directly with the animus from the ego, but he was always too clever for me and led me down the garden path until at last I realized it was really a matter of being in Tao, of being in myself, and having the right attitude. ~Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 14
Optimists invariably hope that humanity learns by its mistakes, and that things will be better after a particularly foolish error. But history teaches us the opposite. It swings from white to black and black to white and, when the cycle is fulfilled, it begins all over again. Consciousness has increased, but historical evidence shows that morality has not . . . . -Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page 14
Jung says, in his “Psychology of the Transference,” that when you can see your shadow, then you can begin to detach from the anima or animus, a task that entails a tremendous effort and that is well portrayed in the symbolism of a crucifixion. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 17
In another seminar Jung pointed out that as soon as a woman begins controlling her animus or a man his anima, then they come up against the herd instinct in mankind. Man’s original state was one of complete unconsciousness, and this condition still persists in us all today. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 22
Jung says in his article “The Relation Between Ego and the Unconscious” that a man must submit to a kind of prehistoric kindergarten schooling until he has won a realistic conception of the powers and factors of a world other than the visible. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 23
It would certainly be quite incorrect to say that the appearance of the masculine figure in women-which Jung has called the animus-only goes back as far as the Middle Ages. In her excellent paper on St. Perpetua, Marie-Louise von Franz has shown us the existence of this figure in the dreams that Perpetua had shortly before her martyrdom circa 200 A.D. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 32
And long before her, we have a wonderful description of an exceedingly negative animus in Asmodaeus, the demon lover of Sarah, who Tobit freed with the help of the angel Raphael. This demon lover, as you will remember, had purportedly killed seven husbands of Sarah before Tobit took the matter in hand. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 33
As Jung has often pointed out, no matter how far our conscious ego may have moved away from the Christian religion, our whole psyche is deeply imprinted with the Christian point of view. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 38
Jung once said in a seminar that mankind has always been possessed by the animus and anima, and it is incredibly difficult to change an outer fact that has existed practically forever. When I asked him if I could publish that passage, he refused his permission on the grounds that it would be badly misunderstood by the general public (much like that one sheep that I mentioned earlier that separates itself from the fold). ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 64
Emma Jung also related that she once met a well-known and very rational Swiss psychiatrist who was on his way to visit a Capuchin monk for exorcism with a patient he could do nothing for. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 64
Jung once mentioned a medium he knew who had an unusually rich unconscious until she began using it for money, and then she began producing the poor superficial stuff typical of professional mediums. This is what makes it so difficult to read spiritualistic literature. Moreover, using mediumistic gifts for money or personal gain is the beginning of black magic. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 77
As Jung was looking at some pictures during the Eranos lectures in Ascona by the monk Opicinus de Canistris, he remarked that the animus, like all archetypal figures, is completely dual natured, neither good nor bad. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 77
If so, the contrary is presumably possible, that is, Jeanne Fery would eat fantasy food and be nourished as if with real food. That such a thing is possible is testified by the Swiss Saint Nicholas of Flue, who supposedly ate nothing at all-except occasionally the host-during the last twenty years of his life. Yet somehow he was nourished. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 80
Furthermore, when Jung and a few priests compared notes, they noticed that both in confession and analysis there is a considerable tendency to confess the lesser sins or make a fuss about trifles and thus avoid seeing the really painful things within. The animus is an archdemon in this way. He artfully pulls the wool over women’s eyes to prevent being discovered himself. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 86
Jung once said that though we cannot quite accept the Indian doctrine of reincarnation due to the lack of scientific evidence, it is actually a psychological fact that people seem to have souls of different ages. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 92
Whereas other people, who seem to have gone through a great many reincarnations and experience Deja vu-like memories, seem to be compelled by super personal destinies. (It does seem generally true in analysis that one should try to find out the age of the soul that you are dealing with.) ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 92-93
Jung has often said that quarrels between married people and people living too close to each other frequently have the purpose of creating more distance. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 93
Most certainly it is extremely unwise to regard any illness as only psychological. And if there was anything the matter with us while working with Jung, we were always sent to see a general practitioner. Many people go much too far in regarding any illness as psychological. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 98
In psychology, it is the man who knows his own abyss who can really understand. Jung often quotes Carpocrates: “Thou canst not be redeemed from a sin thou hast not committed,” a great truth for the man who knows what he is talking about. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 103
Jung also had a patient who went up in the air at the mention of polygamy and who, on being shown that he was polygamous, became impotent for a time thereafter. Such instances prove how the animus and anima can lie so well that one does not even know it oneself. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page 106
Jung said that a person who has read a thousand books and forgotten them is still in a totally different position from the person who has never read any at all. That Mary Magdalene took the blessing for Jeanne meant something along these lines. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 109
I remember Jung once said to me of such a life: well, if the Tibetans are right and there is a Bardo where we go between existence, Mr. So-and-So will very soon not be able to remember this existence at all. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 157
Here is one of the great differences between the two sexes in respect to plots. Jung notes that women’s plots are more personal, while men’s are more distant in a sense and more likely to be coming from the collective and super personal layer of the unconscious. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 163
We will try now to observe our Spiritus Rector-that is, our animus-in an extreme example. Jung speaks about Marie Hay’s The Evil Vineyard already in 1925. And when I said I would like to write a lecture on “women’s plots” he recommended it to me as the best example he knew. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 170
Whenever the anima is projected, she immediately surrounds herself with a peculiar historical feeling which Goethe expressed in the words: “In times gone by you were my wife or sister.” Rider Haggard and [Pierre] Benoit had to go back to Greece and Egypt to give expression to this insistent historical feeling . . . ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 174
Emma Jung first drew my attention to the importance of this shadow figure, who comes up, as it were, just this one time out of the unconscious. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 202
Emma Jung suggested in the discussion after the last lecture that, as we first hear of the love story from Fraulein Alten-who certainly represents the shadow-it might not belong to the legend, but rather it might have originated in Mary’s imagination. This idea casts an interesting light on the book’s suggestion. This figure would then be a figure made by Mary’s own fantasy out of the substances of her subtle body, the “celestial or super-celestial body” of Ruland’s definition. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 217
I shall never forget Jung saying, in October 1939, at the beginning of the war, that it was man’s constant attempt to escape suffering that brought about such appalling catastrophes. “Man has forgotten that life is sacrificial” were his actual words. Like every other phenomenon, life is made up of equal parts of light and shadow, and if we try to avoid the latter, we only obstruct the course of the former. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 243
Jung was, I think, one of the happiest people I have ever known. He had a genius for enjoying life, and yet not many have suffered more. And I never knew him try to avoid it. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 245
To be able to read, reckon, and write means an enormous gain in consciousness for an illiterate girl, and, as Emma Jung made so clear in her excellent paper on the animus, nothing is so helpful in overcoming animus possession as to work with the conscious mind. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 263
As Jung once noted: religious fundamentalists hold us to a two-thousand-year-old tradition actively given to us by God at that time without, however, allowing God to add anything new since Tobit belongs to this latter class of believers. He is as much concerned with traditionalist dictates as were the old Egyptians. Neither way is open for new ideas. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 308
As Jung noted, a really loving woman can hold the fort against the devil himself. A firm hold on the Eros principle can work miracles. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 321
Jung often speaks of the piety of animals and of how much nearer they live than we to God’s will-to their true nature. Referring to the logion in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, Jung writes: “That means the instincts, one could almost say the blind instincts; the way of nature will bring you quite naturally where you have to go.” ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 335
Jung once said that one should choose or support the animus figure that is in connection with the instinct because he is the one who is in direct connection with life. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 339
In Aion, Jung quotes the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch who claims that the time preceding the coming of the Messiah will fall into twelve parts, and the Messiah will appear in the twelfth. As a time division, Jung notes, the number twelve points to the zodiac, of which the twelfth is the sign of the fishes.56 It is then at the end of time-and the coming of the Messiah-that Leviathan will rise out of the sea. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 340
Throughout the history of symbolism, the fish often represents an all-devouring concupiscentia. In Aion Jung says that the fish owes these bad qualities to its relationship with the mother and love goddesses, Ishtar, Astarte, Atargatis, and Aphrodite.
Venus reaches her zenith in the zodiacal sign of the fishes where Atargatis and her son are also found. We still eat fish on Friday, the “Day of Venus.” ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 341
Jung notes that we can see “from the example of Leviathan how the great ‘fish’ gradually split into its opposite, after having itself been the opposite of the highest God and hence his shadow, the embodiment of his evil side. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 342
He also points out in the Visions seminar that the punishment of Prometheus for stealing the divine fire was not only being chained to the rocks but also to endure an eagle constantly eating his liver. Jung speaks here thus of the liver being the thing that lives in us, the symbolic seat of life. ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 347
In another place, Jung says that the liver is connected with the emotions, the center of passion. (As you know, a liver upset is often the result of an outburst of fury or, even more often, due to swallowing emotion.) ~Barbara Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II Page 347
At first the spirit [that is, animus] comes toward us from outside, to the child mostly from the father or from a man who takes his place, later a teacher, an older brother, a friend, the husband, and finally then in outer objective expressions of the spirit, the church, the state, society and its institutions, and in the creations of the sciences and the arts. Most often the woman has no direct access to these objective manifestations of the spirit; rather she finds them first through a man who is her guide and her mediator.
This guide, this mediator, then becomes the carrier or the representation of her animus; onto him the animus is projected. There is no conflict as long as this projection succeeds, that is, as long as the projected image is more or less covered by the man who carries it. On the contrary, this state of affairs would in a certain manner appear to be perfect, in particular when the man who is the carrier [of the animus projection] is also a man whom the woman experiences as a human being and with whom the woman has a good relationship.
When such a relationship is continually maintained, then we have what could be called an ideal relationship, without conflict, whereby the woman remains unconscious. Today, however, we can no longer remain unconscious. This seems to me to be proven by the fact that many women, if not practically all, who believe themselves to be happy and content in such a presumably perfect animus relationship are plagued by nervous disorders or physical symptoms. Anxiety attacks, disturbances in sleep, and general nervousness occur, or headaches, distortions in visual perception and even problems with the lungs may arise . . . . ~Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page 28
The same constellation naturally occurs in a reversed manner with the man. He also wants to see the anima image that hovers before him in the woman, and through this wish, which effects her by means of suggestion, compels her to live not her own life but to become his anima figure.
This situation is then coupled with the condition that the anima and animus are constellated juxtaposed to one another, that is, an anima statement on the one side conjures up the animus on the other. And vice-versa. And thus a vicious cycle is set in motion that is difficult to break and creates one of the worst complications in the relationships between man and woman. -Carl Jung, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women II, Page 29
